The present invention relates to improvements in load-carrying devices, especially wheelbarrows.
Wheelbarrows have always posed a storage problem particularly to those living in the city, where the available storage areas for such bulky implements are very confined, if practically non-existent.
Wheelbarrows of the knock-down type have been proposed, for instance, in U.S. Pat. No. 2,742,300. In such type of wheelbarrow, the wheel fork, handles and legs can be disassembled from the barrow frame and separated out for compacting. Although the use of tools is deliberately avoided and there are no bolts, nuts or other small left-overs to be bagged and stored, there still remains the possibility of the separated parts being misplaced or eventually lost during storage, particularly the handles and legs which are not generally speaking bulky items and as such can be readily overlooked.
Moreover, many persons have suffered severe back injuries as a result of loading a wheelbarrow with heavy objects, such as logs or rocks. In the loading process, one must of course lift the object to be loaded from the ground either directly with the hands or using a tool such as a shovel and bring such object to the height of the barrow receptacle in order to load same. If the object is too heavy for the user or is not well balanced in weight so that it can be easily lifted, or if the user is not positioned so as to correclty lift the object, back injuries will most likely occur.